


same brain

by kenopsia (indie)



Series: research methodology [2]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Bingo square: stubble, F/M, Oral Sex, dreamshare research
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-02
Updated: 2016-08-02
Packaged: 2018-07-28 19:28:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7653823
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/indie/pseuds/kenopsia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Arthur moves in to be Ariadne's live-in research assistant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	same brain

Arthur notes how well Ariadne looks when she picks him up at the airport. In her car. That last thing sidetracks him a bit.

“You can drive in Paris?” Arthur says, both eyebrows ratcheted up. 

“What, like it's hard?” She jokes, aggressively nosing her way into an unmarked roundabout and slingshotting through it. 

Arthur clicks his seatbelt into place. “I don’t drive here.”

“We can’t all be Gryffindors,” Ariadne grins, and Arthur is horrified that she is  _ looking at him  _ instead of looking at the fucking insane roads and city drivers. “Anyways. I really do appreciate you coming out here.”

“Of course,” Arthur says. “Your call was about the most interesting thing that’s happened to me all month.”

Ariadne groans. “Sorry about that. I went off-meds for the last six weeks of school so I had enough space in my head to get ready to defend my thesis. I know it makes me unbearable.”

“You’re plenty bearable,” Arthur says, a little thrown by how easily she mentions it. It isn’t a surprise to him, he wouldn’t be a good point man if he didn’t know. “And dreamshare could use the research.”

“Plenty bearable,” she repeats with a grin, using one hand to open a travel cup and fish out two pieces of gum. Arthur takes one, and she tosses the other one into her own mouth. Arthur keeps his eyes on the street before them. “Anyways. Since we did that thing, I just want you to know something I figured out.”

“You mean you’ve already solved one of your dozen questions?” Arthur asks. 

“No, no, don’t be dull, I haven’t had the time to do any solving yet.  _ But!  _ I did happen to find out that being very wealthy agrees with me,  _ a lot.  _ Like, a lot a lot.” 

Ariadne is grinning around her chewing gum, little flyaway hairs framing her face in a way that makes her look like a colonial explorer, charting untapped wilds and creating fresh taxonomy for as-yet-unnamed birds. She still looks a bit like a college student in her jeans and hooded sweatshirt, but Arthur had noted when she stepped out that she was in very expensive shoes. 

“I found that out pretty early on in my work with the Cobbs,” Arthur confides. “I went AWOL from the military shortly after that.”

“Oh, shit,” Ariadne says. “Should you be telling me that?”

Arthur remembers her on the phone, alluding to the Fischer job but being afraid to say his common first name, and a fond amusement wells up in him. “It’s unlikely that there’s any surveillance on you, but I can do a thorough scrub of your flat and electronics if you like.”

Ariadne gives a little groan. “I was hoping you were only a superspy in dreams.”

“Sorry to … disappoint?” Arthur says.  

Ariadne touches her fingers to her forehead. “I just need someone to help me do a study. I don’t have time for sexual tension when you go and act like hot shit while you sweep my apartment for bugs.” 

She sounds so put upon that Arthur huffs a laugh. “If it helps, I promise to check for listening devices in the least attractive way possible.”

“I’ll still know,” Ariadne groans. “I’m very good at detecting undercover sex appeal.”

Arthur felt buoyant the whole ride back to Ariadne’s flat. 

*

“My focus is so splintered,” Ariadne says, showing him to a room she called a guest bedroom, but was clearly the office of a mad physicist. There were papers on every surface, tucked in and on and under, wedged between models and sitting upright in sorting trays, looking particularly unsorted about it. 

“Wow,” Arthur says. 

“That’s not a good wow,” Ariadne says. 

Arthur moves more fully into the room, almost tripping over a corner of a mattress on the way. Well. There’s the bed found. 

“Looks like you’ve got a ton of notes here.”

“My ultimate dream is to have a crime wall,” she laments. “But right now I just have some questions and more money than God and I want to research  _ everything.  _ I just want to  _ know shit.  _ Is that too much to ask?”

“Nope,” Arthur says. “It’s not.” 

Arthur indicates the closest pile to him. “May I?” he asks, and scoops it up when Ariadne nods. “Give me twenty four hours to put some of this in order, then we can prioritize what you’re most interested in, and what is going to be easier to research concurrently.”

“My hero,” she sighs. 

Later, when he’s cleared off enough of the mess (almost all of it part brilliant and part unhinged) that he can start sorting at the newly-uncovered desk, Ariadne comes up behind him to tell him that she’s made dinner. 

She presents him with a plate of chicken, slightly burned on one side. “It’s food,” she says defensively.

“It looks lovely.” Arthur is stupidly charmed by the fact that he’s seen her reams of manic, brilliant research threads but that she has definitely presented him a single chicken breast (marginally burnt) on a plate and called it dinner. Tomorrow night he’ll be sure to put himself in charge of the dinner. 

Arthur moves a few more things so the two of them can comfortably sit at her cramped table, wedged in the kitchen. 

“So … about my research plan. Sorry — should I wait until after dinner? I know some people care about — ”

Arthur snorts. “I was on the run with Dom for eighteen months before we got him home. You think we had rules about talking shop during bonding time? Go ahead.”

“Okay, so one of my concerns is the samples. I mean. There’s no way to get anything systematic. I’d have to do a snowball thing,” Ariadne says, waving her fork around to illustrate snowballing, “and of course the bias is that all the people who are involved with dreamshare are criminals.”

“Are you afraid you’re only going to learn about their lawless crime brains?” 

“This is no time for jokes, Arthur,” Ariadne says. “There is serious research to be done and such a weird and small population. It’s like every single thing we learn will just be a case study.”

“They have their value. I feel like everything we know about multiple personality disorder came from, like, three cases.”

“That probably isn’t true,” Ariadne says, “but I appreciate you for saying it.” After she chews on her next bite for a thoughtful moment, she adds, “Also, they call it Dissociative Identity Disorder, now.”

Arthur makes an assenting noise, and chews thoughtfully for a few minutes. 

“That last week,” Ariadne says, “when we were waiting to wake up on the plane… in that cabin, I had thought something was going to happen between the two of us.” 

Arthur stops chewing. He had thought this conversation would come, but not on the first night, under the single bulb that hangs in her cramped kitchen, Ariadne’s hair tied messily behind her and Arthur battling his own jet-lagged exhaustion. 

There had been — she’s not wrong. After they’d emerged from the water, they’d waited out the sedative in a cabin Arthur had designed just outside the city. It had been tense, waiting and hoping they would remain unnoticed from mobbing projections if they could just keep themselves out of sight and away from Robert’s unconscious notice. 

Arthur and Ariadne had kept each other occupied frequently, turning on the TV so that one of them could show the other the blurry approximations of movies they liked. Arthur remembers with a fond warmth that Ariadne’s rendition of Homeward Bound had been crystal-clear, like it was the movie she knew by heart, and turned to in times of turbulence. Eames had looked up from his poker game with Dom and Saito to watch. 

And there had been one night, warm and blurred by the effects of alcohol that only existed in their own minds, a little handsy, but not so much that Arthur wouldn’t be able to look at her in the morning. 

“It was all in a dream,” Arthur says. 

Ariadne’s face shutters. “Okay then. Well. I’m sorry for misinterpreting.”

“No,” Arthur says. “You misunderstand. I wanted something to happen, but not in a dream. And it felt a little predatory, with you so new to dreamshare.”

“Well,” Ariadne says, sitting up straighter to gain an inch. “I’m not naive, and I’m not stupid, and I’m not actually that young.”

“I don’t think you’re any of those.” Arthur says, wonder if he missed his chance by not making his move then. He’d thought that Ariadne’s job would be her first, that she was a natural and of course there would be so many more, when school was out of the way. “But before you’re used to lucid dreaming, you’re still likely to feel that disconnect of dream and waking decision making. I didn’t want you to wake up and feel horrified if that no longer felt like something you’d act on. We do shit in natural dreams all the time we wouldn’t do awake.”

“Well. That was quite a speech,” Ariadne says. Now she’s smirking a little.

“Was it a good one, though?” Arthur asks, swallowing down a smirk. “Compelling?”

“It was okay,” Ariadne says. “Would have been better had I heard it when I thought I’d been weirdly played, instead of six months later.”

“How would you have been able to focus on your master’s thesis, if I had?” Arthur teases.

Ariadne digs into her bag, looped on the shoulder of her chair and pulls out a little bottle, shaking it at him. “I outsource my attention span in times of dire need,” she says. “I would have managed.”

“Duly noted,” Arthur says. 

They are both quiet at the table for a while before Ariadne says, matter of fact: “You can put the moves on me  _ after _ the research is done.” 

It feels so strange, unlike anything else he’s ever done in his decade of romantic and sexual entanglements, to have a start date clearly labeled and looming. Arthur swallows, amused and interested, “Deal.”

*

Yusuf is unstoppable against the language barrier question. He just knows so many, and the concrete knowledge he has branches of in every direction, picking out sounds and root words of romantic languages because of his rock solid knowledge of Latin, making educated guesses at mandarin. 

It’s more or less alright, though, because Ariadne wants to know everything there is to know about the chemical composition and whys of Somnacin, so she puts him there anyway. 

She’s found that the more people she adds to dreamshare, the more clear communication becomes. There is a collective fluency that builds. Ariadne’s notebook gets filled with things like,  _ Trial 46: even when the only linking member of the dream (fluent in both english and german) is out of direct earshot, the monolingual members of the group are still able to communicate, seemingly unaware of the language barrier. Researcher understands both sides of the conversation as if they’ve been spoken in english. Results seem to support the fractured consciousness theory, requires further testing.  _

She writes them out, longhand in polished cherry wood pens. Three weeks in, Arthur gets a hard on when she puts the nub of it in her mouth, lipping at it thoughtfully. It isn’t until he catches her eye that he realizes she’s doing it on purpose. 

Arthur holds her gaze while he rolls up the sleeves of his pale gold button-down. Ariadne snorts and goes back to making notes. 

At night, Arthur types them in, keeps them sorted and organized, leaves his own notations to let Ariadne know what he thinks the trials imply, and keeps a more thorough record of methodology.

*

By the time he gets to finally see Ariadne naked, he’s halfway in love. 

Late night research has them staying long after they’ve sent their subjects home, compensated fairly in cash, which has led to Arthur cooking at one in the morning, making them sandwiches somewhere between a croque monsieur and a monte cristo, french toast and gruyere cheese, and some freshly grated hash browns. Ariadne watches him from where she’s planted on the counter, elbows on her knees, and pretends she doesn’t speak English when Arthur asks for help. 

The joke’s on her, because Arthur knows exactly how to ask for help in French. 

They crack open a bottle of wine. 

“I thought,” Ariadne says, a little flushed. She’s pulled her hair down out of the twisted bun she keeps it in while they’re working, and it falls in loose, messy spirals down her shoulders, “you’d make a good research partner, but obviously I made a mistake.”

“Did you now?”

“Clearly should have kept you trapped in the kitchen from the beginning.”

“I’ve got a lot of talents,” he says. 

“I had a hunch,” she says. There is powdered sugar near her eyebrow, somehow. Having noticed this does nothing to still the simmering interest he’s been feeling, climbing steadily all week. 

“You wanted to wait until after we were done,” he points out. 

“I don’t want to be done here anytime soon. Do you?” she asks, and waits for Arthur to shake his head  _ no  _ before she continues. “So how about you let me blow you, and then you can blow me?” 

“Sure,” Arthur huffs, amused, “I’ll blow you.”

“You know what I meant. I hate  _ going down on.  _ It just sounds really gross to me.”

“Duly noted,” Arthur says, filing it away under terminology to use in situations where it will make Ariadne laugh, when he doesn’t actually want to set the mood. 

He kisses her. They both taste like maple syrup and sugar and peach-raspberry jam. Ariadne laughs when he comes up for air, before she pulls him back in by his ears. It is everything Arthur likes about kissing someone he knows well, playful and unambiguously interested. Ariadne curls her hands under his lapels and he lets his own fall to the swell of her waist, cupping her hips in the cradle of his hands. 

Somehow he gets Ariadne back to her room without dislodging himself from her mouth. “Oh my God,” he says, when he gets there, momentarily distracted from his lust when he sees her bedroom. 

Ariadne flushes prettily from the crest of her cheekbones to the nub of her exposed shoulder, poking up through the neckhole of her rucked up shirt. “We … could move to your room,” she suggests.

“I have a cot,” he reminds her, flatly amused, and moves to her bed. 

“Don’t — don’t try to clean those up,” she says, and he lifts one shoulder in a shrug. 

“Okay,” he says, and shoves all of the papers to the floor. 

Ariadne releases a little shocked noise. “If you hadn’t done such a brilliant job of dealing with my library,” she grumbles, trailing off.

“I know,” Arthur smirks. “I will deal with this mess.” And then he more or less tosses her onto her bed. She lands with a bounce and he climbs over her, bracketing her in with his knees. 

“Can I?” he says, with his hands in the hem of her shirt. 

“Yeah — yes.” she says, lifting her arms above her head helpfully for him to pull it off. Arthur devotes careful attention to Ariadne’s breasts, nosing in close and breathing on one of them before he poked the tip of his tongue to the point of a nipple. Ariadne jolts beneath him, and he grins before leaning down to set his teeth around it with absolutely no pressure. It is a precise, delicate hold. 

Ariadne squirms beneath him, dislodging herself from his mouth. “Don’t be a tease,” she says. “If you’re going to get in there, do a good job.”

Arthur loves a girl who knows what she wants. He feels his pulse surge lower, he can feel it in his abdomen. “As you wish,” he mutters, and leans down to give a tentative suckle and tug. Ariadne makes a low sounds that goes straight to his cock. 

Arthur puts his hand on the other breast, but gives it an absentminded, barely there touch while he lavishes attention on the one beneath him. Ariadne keeps surging up, tilting into his mouth, making needy little sounds. 

Arthur would have ordinarily moved on by now, but she’s so fucking reactive that he feels stuck, glues to the spot. He’s fairly oral, himself, and happy to settle in wherever someone wants him. He lingers because Ariadne is squirming beneath him, breathless and squeaky. 

“Come on,” she says, “I’ve got two of them.” 

Arthur leans back on his haunches to get a good look at her. “So you do,” he grins. She also has — “The Venus of Willendorf,” he says, cupping her breast in his hand and looking past it, on her ribcage. 

“I kept waiting for you to notice,” she grins. Arthur puts his hand in her hair, rumpled but silky soft. 

“It’s really clean. And unique,” Arthur says, rolling her a bit to get a good look at it and on impulse leaning down to scrape it with his teeth. “When did you get it done?”

“Um. Twenty,” she says. “It was a celebratory and mourning tat.” 

“Your first?” Arthur wants to know. 

Ariadne grins slyly at him. “When you see the others, you can guess the order.”

“Alright,” Arthur smiles back at her, and hooks his fingers in her jeans, catching her eye to make sure she’s ready for him to peel them off.

“I should probably warn you that it’s stubbly down there. I didn’t plan on having sex with you for another few weeks.”

“I don’t mind your hair if you don’t.” Arthur says. “But I know keeping to the timeline is important to you...”

“If you don’t get my fucking pants off right now, Arthur…” 

Ariadne has gorgeous thighs, strong and lithe, smooth when he rubs his face against them. “I thought you said,” he starts, before he realizes that she didn’t mean his legs. Lying back in only her underpants, Arthur can see two more tattooes, one at her ankle of a tree, thick and bent in the middle with a little narrow spray of leaves at the top, and a little silver suitcase at her hip. “This is quite the collection.”

Ariadne rocks up so she’s sitting up. “I haven’t seen yours yet.”

“I don’t have any,” Arthur laughs.

Ariadne scoffs. “I’ll believe that when I see it,” she says, unbuttoning him from chin to stomach, none too gently. 

“I knew it. You liar!”

Arthur has a paper plane over his heart, fading now that it’s over ten years old. He shrugs. “Air force,” she crows. 

“Yes Ariadne, you’re very clever,” he says, trying to sound indulgent without letting her know that he’s a little floored by how fast she made the connection. 

She lays back down, throwing her wrists over her head, in just her underpants, and Arthur has a chance to drink her in completely, her body a bit of a marvel, geeky and glorious at the same time. She has a soft little tummy he’d want to put his face in if he didn’t think she’d get the wrong idea. 

He shucks his own trousers and boxer-briefs, and hooks his thumb in the sides of her underpants, pulling them down as she helpfully lifts her lower body. There is one more tattoo the action reveals, a small strip of numbers  _ 6 x 7 = 42.  _ Arthur boggles down at it.    
  
“It’s important to have both the question and the answer,” she tells him, a little smug. 

“I am going to go dow— er, blow you for an hour,” Arthur says, a little reverent. 

“Be my guest,” she grins up at him, and Arthur feels a little helpless as he moves to the join of her thighs, pushing out one leg until he can feel the tense muscle of her inner thigh under his palm. He holds her there for a minute, kissing her from her knee inward until his mouth finally lands and she stops squirming. 

Arthur gets comfortable, his own straining cock pinned beneath him and he seals his mouth around her clit, brushing his knuckles against her, lower, while he creates an undulating suction. “Oh,” Ariadne says, looking down at him and flushing when she sees him looking directly up at her. 

Arthur settles in for the long haul, the bristly stubble of her tickling his nose and cheeks. 

Ariadne is hot and pliant under him, her fingers carding through his hair and leg tensing under where he still has it pulled wide, more or less continuously kissing at the flexing heat of her. 

He keeps at it, probing and shifting and sucking while his fingertips trace the wet slope of her, dancing  _ around _ but not  _ in,  _ while he lingers with his tongue and lips. The first time she gets off almost feels like a freebie, sudden and accompanied by some of the most adorable breathless sounds, but the second one he has to work for.

“Arthur,” she says, voice cracking around his name. 

He rests his chin on her pubic bone to look up at her. “Yes dear?”

“If I had known you were so into nerdy tattoos, I would have showed you my Rube Goldberg on the dream level and you would have been helpless.”

Arthur bolts straight upright. He’s already seen the glorious expanse of her stomach, legs and torso from the front. He rolls her over. Her back is completely blank, delicate shoulders and narrow waist, back dimples and round bottom but not a single bit of ink in sight. “You liar,” he teases, giving her bottom a quick smack. It bounces in his wake and she shifts her hips. 

She laughs a little breathlessly. “Sorry. It is in the plan, but I want to design and build it first.” 

“It sounds great,” he says, tracing with a fingertip around her visible shoulderblades. He pictures it. It doesn’t even exist yet, and already he finds it stupidly sexy. He nudges her so that she’s on her back again and starts to lean down again, but she stops him before his mouth connects.

“Get down here,” she says. “No, like — yeah, put your head over there. Your poor cock has been squashed for a while. I don’t want it feeling unwelcome in my bed.”

She gets his cock in her mouth while he’s trying to his best vantage point at getting his mouth back on her and he has to pause for a minute while his vision whites out, before he rights himself. He loves the feedback loop the position achieves, the laughing, off-synch give and take if it. 

He loves the hungry mess of it, and he eases off of her to let her know about the building crescendo his body is reaching. She catches his ejaculate in her mouth before padding into her en suite to spit it out in the sink. Arthur watches her lovely bare backside as it retreats. He has a private laugh as a thought floats through his head. 

“Why are you laughing?” 

Arthur battles with himself, because he knows it’ll come out wrong, but orgasms always make his tongue looser than he means. “Leftovers,” he says, opening his arm so she can crawl against him. She parts her legs so that one crosses with his thigh, and he can feel the soft hair of her at the side of his leg, warm skin on warm skin. “I should put you in tupperware.”

“Very weird brain,” she says, dashing a kiss against his temple. 

“Same brain,” he tells her. 

“Except mine is cool,” she says. 

“How many roads must a man walk down?” he asks. 

“Alright,” she says, nuzzling beneath his chin. “Same brain.”

*

Arthur gets Ariadne a moleskine. She hands it to him at the end of the day to type it up, and between her intuitive notes, there are occasionally lewd drawings to keep him on his toes. Sometimes he transcribes the images, as if they’re an important part of their findings.  _ [Appendix A: image of averaged sized phallus with preseminal fluid dribbling from the tip] _

By the end of Ariadne’s short term lease on the research space, she and Arthur have set up the first three steps of their elaborate breakfast machine, and Arthur is well on his way to creating Ariadne a crime wall.

Her bedroom requires almost daily intervention to keep her bed tidy enough to have sex on.

He’s happy enough to do that, usually, because Arthur will do all manner of things for his brilliant girlfriend, who happens to be a slob, but sometimes he throws up his hands and they have sex on the cot. 


End file.
